What do you do with a gaffe prone dunce who has just been elected Vice President of the United States?
Put him in charge of something meaningless:
Vice President-elect Joe Biden will oversee a task force that will make recommendations on how to build the ranks of the middle class, that ambiguously defined segment of society in which most Americans identify themselves.
Biden said the task force will include other Cabinet members and it will present President-elect Barack Obama with a package of proposals designed to ensure the middle class is "no longer being left behind."
"We'll look at everything from college affordability to after-school programs, the things that affect people's daily lives," Biden said during an interview to be broadcast Sunday on ABC's "This Week".
Overseeing a task force has become tradition for vice presidents. Dick Cheney led a task force on energy. Al Gore had the task of reinventing government. George H.W. Bush, while serving as Ronald Reagan's vice president, oversaw a task force charged with reducing government regulation. While all of those efforts resulted in some accomplishments, it's also clear that the issues they confronted were so large and systemic that many could and did question the progress they made.
Biden said the measure of economic success in an Obama administration would be whether the middle class was growing. He said Obama planned to announce the formation of the task force later Sunday.
They could make a good start by defining just what is meant by "middle class?" Since that's going to be a virtual impossibility given the massive breadth of income, family size, housing, investments, and a dozen other criteria that no one agrees on, we can assume Biden will be kept busy doing absolutely nothing for a while.
That is probably better than having him get within 10 feet of a microphone where his utter cluelessness and confusion will become apparent once again.
Too bad the press is so in the tank for these guys. We would have a steady stream of entertaining anecdotes coming from the Veep's office to distract us from what could very well be a disaster of an Administration.
But the media didn't cover the majority of Biden whoppers, slip-ups, idiotic idioms, and breathtakingly shallow analysis during the campaign so we'll have to settle for blogs to fill us in.
Watch this site for the good stuff.
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